Tagged — Jamie Lyons
I'm not going to romanticize this for you. Santa Cruz isn't some postcard fantasy, some California dream sequence scored to Beach Boys harmonies. It's complicated. It's always been complicated.
I grew up in the Bay Area, that sprawling, schizophrenic collection of suburbs and cities that can't quite decide what it wants to be. And like every restless kid with salt in their veins, I came over the hill. Highway 17, that beautiful bastard of a road, snaking through redwoods so old they were here when your great-great-grandparents were still figuring out indoor plumbing. You'd come around that last bend and there it was—the Pacific, cold and indifferent and absolutely necessary.
The water here isn't some tropical bath. It's 50-something degrees on a good day, the kind of cold that makes your bones ache and your balls retreat into your body cavity. But that's the point, isn't it? Suffering equals meaning. Every paddle out, every duck dive through the shorebreak, every wave that pounds you into the sand and makes you wonder why you do this to yourself, it's all part of the conversation I'm having with this place.
As a kid, I didn't understand that. I just knew that the waves at Steamers were better than anything I could find in the Bay. That the weird hippie-surfer-university town vibe was intoxicating in ways I couldn't articulate. It smelled different here, eucalyptus and brine and marijuana and coffee, all mixed together into something that hit different than the sterile tech-boom suburbs I came from.
Then came my twenties. Beach bonfires that stretched until dawn, cheap beer and cheaper philosophy, thinking we'd figured it all out while we absolutely hadn't figured out anything. The thing about Santa Cruz in your twenties is that it enables your delusions. It's a place that tells you that maybe you don't need to grow up, that conventional success is overrated.
Fast forward, because that's what time does, and now I'm teaching at UCSC. My partner's a professor there too. We own a house on the Westside. We're raising a kid. I've became the very thing I probably would have mocked in my bonfire years: settled academics with a mortgage and a Subaru.
And here's the thing that would have blown young-me's mind: I wouldn't change it.
The Westside is different from the downtown circus, from the boardwalk tourists and the Pacific Avenue street scene. It's quieter here, more residential, with that particular Northern California aesthetic where redwoods grow between houses and everyone pretends they're not participating in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.
UCSC sits up in those hills like some kind of modernist monastery, hidden in the forest, where the radical politics of the '60s still echo through the banana slugs and the interdisciplinary degrees. It's an odd place to work, even part-time, it's part serious research institution, part eternal summer camp.
Raising a kid here means teaching them to respect the ocean's power before they're five. Every month, it seems, you hear about someone pulled off the beach and drowned by a sneaker wave, or even just ordinary wave. The ocean here does not forgive ignorance or carelessness. It takes people, tourists who turn their backs, locals who should know better, kids who wandered too close. It's a reminder that beauty and danger aren't opposites; they're roommates who share the same address.
So yeah, my kid knows to never turn their back on the water. He's growing up thinking it's normal to see sea otters and harbor seals, that redwood forests are just what forests look like, that the smell of eucalyptus is what wind smells like. It means they'll be spoiled by natural beauty in ways that will make everywhere else seem diminished.
But it also means living in a town that can't quite figure out its identity, is it a surf town? A university town? A tech suburb spillover? A haven for the housed and a nightmare for the unhoused? All of the above, uncomfortably coexisting, trying not to make eye contact.
The truth is, my relationship with Santa Cruz has gone from infatuation to addiction to something like actual love, which is to say, it's complicated and flawed and I can see all the problems clearly and I'm here anyway. I know the traffic is terrible: Mission Street should be renamed Mission Impossible. I know the housing crisis is real. I know the town sometimes feels like it's being pulled apart by competing visions of what it should be.
But on a Tuesday morning, when I'm paddling out, when the fog is still sitting offshore like a held breath, when my kid is at preschool learning about ecosystems and my partner is teaching a seminar on something brilliant I only half-understand, when the water is so cold it makes my teeth ache but the waves are clean and the kelp forests are swaying below and I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, in those moments, I get it.
This place took me from teenage visitor to twentysomething degenerate to middle-aged homeowner. It witnessed my evolution, or devolution, depending on who you ask. And somewhere along the way, I stopped coming over the hill to visit Santa Cruz.
I started living here.
Finca Fiasco 2025
At first, when you unlock the studio door, when you pull out the brushes or the charcoal or whatever the hell you’re working with that day, it’s packed in there. Every single person you’ve ever known is crammed into that space with you. Your first music teacher who said you had potential but lacked discipline, […]
Read
Finca Fiasco 2025
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932, back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be, she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, […]
ReadFinca Fiasco 2025
Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch I’ve been places. I’ve seen things. I’ve eaten meals that cost more than my first car and stood in front of art that makes you question everything you thought you knew […]
Read
Engineering 2022
The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls? So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the […]
Read
Finca Fiasco 2021
I’m not going to bullshit you about some mystical awakening or whatever the fuck people claim happens when they see big trees. But laying there on a bed of redwood needles looking up at five month old Charlie, this tiny perfect human who somehow shares my DNA, held by Lindsey in that cathedral of redwoods? […]
Read
Adventure 2021
If you know, you know. If you don’t, no amount of explaining is going to make you understand what it means to stand there at dawn, wetsuit half-on, watching the sets roll in. This isn’t Malibu poseur bullshit. This isn’t trust fund kids playing at danger on longboards their daddies bought them. This is cold […]
ReadEngineering 2021
And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had ‘phoned vainly and time after […]
Read
Resistance 2020
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to themAntoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince Children and families gather at the road block on Highway One in Santa Cruz begging the state for more resources to fight the CZULightningComplex Fire. Here’s what you need […]
Read
Absolute Solipsism 2020
So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was […]
Read
Individualism 2020
Here’s the thing about paradise during the apocalypse: it makes me feel like an asshole for even having the thought that I might be suffering. The Westside’s giving you everything, that relentless California sunshine hammering down like some kind of cosmic joke, the Pacific doing its eternal churn six blocks away, and I’m sitting there […]
ReadIndustries 2020
At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 the world’s falling apart, and I’m standing in front of a bronze surfer on Santa Cruz‘s Westside, taping up PPE to enact a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy that nobody’s read in its entirety because, and here’s the beautiful, fucked-up part, it’s lost. Gone. Euripides wrote it, and then history ate […]
Read
Absolute Solipsism 2020
Adventure 2019
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose […]
Read
Individualism 2019
“To Honor Surfing” Statue by Thomas Marsh Lighthouse Point, Santa Cruz. “Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing […]
Read
Wanderlust 2019
Telephone Archaeology: Santa Cruz Payphone Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. Jack Kerouac
ReadWanderlust 2017
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Davenport Beach, it’s not some tourist trap with overpriced […]
Read